“Baby, it’s cold outside,” are words from a classic wintertime song. For those of us who live in Southern California, “cold” means that the temperatures have dropped below 70 degrees. 70 degrees will be the average daytime temperature for the January 2011 SA/S-Anon International Convention.
As a member of the SA’s International Committee, I serve as the contact person for the SA community in Russia. I grew up in Moscow and moved to the USA over a decade ago. I found sobriety here after hitting bottom in 2004.
I first went to SA about two years ago, after several years of membership in another S-fellowship. “Knowledge and pride were our chief obstacles here” (SA 91). There was hardly any sobriety in the few young SA groups in my country and no group recovery—and the sobriety definition was being neglected.
The start of SA Belgium is quite a funny story. In July 2008, a Belgian member from another S-fellowship traveled to Akron, OH, to participate in the SA International Convention there. A couple of years before, he had sought help in another fellowship because he wanted to stop... smoking!!
Several of us drove to Ottawa on August 23rd to support a new Ottawa SA meeting. Ottawa (the capital of Canada) has not had an SA meeting since 2003—so we are very grateful to one of our members for taking the initiative to start this meeting.
I’m an SA member living in Sudbury, Ontario (Canada). Here in Sudbury, we have a large group of SA members who meet every Monday and Friday. One day I wrote a poem, expressing my gratitude for the members of my group. Long after I wrote it, an SA friend told me the poem had blessed her.
In Tasmania, we have a meeting location at Deloraine, midway between Ulverstone and Launceston. However, this is a round trip of 140 km for me and 100 km for a second member. A third member lives in Hobart, 300 km from Ulverstone and 200 km from Launceston. Thus, the three of us usually meet by conference call.
The Middle Tennessee Fellowships will once again host the winter International Conventions. Our theme describes the result of following the journey of Twelve Step Recovery: when we thoroughly follow this path, we will have a spiritual awakening and enter into the “Fellowship of the Spirit.”
The Reno, Nevada group has two meetings a week and four regular members. We have a website and are working on other ways to pass the message about our meetings, in a manner that is attractive and not promotive.
I’m Jerry L., Chair of SA’s Translations Committee (a subcommittee of SA’s Literature Committee). Our committee handles requests for permission to translate Sexaholics Anonymous and other SA literature from English into other languages.
